The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (review)

In The South in Black and White, McKay Jenkins endeavors “to create a picture of an era that remains underexplored” and “to discover the roots of white racialized thinking” of that generation. To do so, Jenkins focuses on four Southern writers of the 1940s: W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, and Carson McCullers. Jenkins selects this intriguing quartet, he tells us, not only because they were Southern white writers who wrote provocatively of race, even when they did not mean to, but also because, despite differences of class and gender, they were individuals ambivalent about their sexuality. Calling upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jenkins argues that “the gay [or sexually ambiguous] rhetorical position can be useful in taking apart notions of stable identity,” including racial identity. Jenkins’s project departs from and returns to Ralph Ellison’s assertion “that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.”

Of the book’s five chapters, the one on Lillian Smith is most cogently argued. Smith’s antiracist position acts as a touchstone throughout Jenkins’s book. But the chapters on the fascinating figures Cash and Percy are not so coherent and are even, at times, confounding. Although Jenkins rightly accuses self-styled intellectual and Menckenite journalist Wilbur Cash and his monumental work, The Mind of the South, of taking no interest in African American intellectuals and, also rightly, credits Cash with astute class analysis, Jenkins equivocates in his judgment of Cash’s racial position. In the end, he asks us to accept that Cash projected his frustration about his sexual impotence into racial violence, thus writing of lynching not in a tone of caustic outrage but of shared sadism. Cash’s assertion that the “Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude” is read by Jenkins as “the perfect emblem for Cash: stabbing a Negro with a sword is a way to penetrate the Negro’s body and still maintain white sexual and social propriety.” This argument might have been more convincing if Jenkins had closely compared Cash’s description of lynching as sadism to other texts on lynching. Ida Wells-Barnett’s On Lynching and William Ivy Hair’s Carnival of Fury offer models for analyzing the discourse of racial violence.

In contrast to Cash, who reads race within systems of power, Percy’s beautifully written memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, adheres to a personalized nostalgia that denies that such systems and their racial practices are institutional. Yet Jenkins is far easier on Percy than on Cash. Anyone who has read John Barry’s Rising Tide and his analysis of Percy’s decision to deny African Americans access to evacuation during the 1927 Mississippi River flood will ask a stronger argument from Jenkins. A closer examination of Percy’s sexuality and his racial metaphors would have been welcome; the pastoral chapter of Lanterns that celebrates a shepherd on an Aegean isle is not mentioned.

McKay Jenkins frames for us a project important in its emphasis on the South of the 1940s and on four complex white intellectuals. It is a project worth arguing with.